Yas Waterworld Bags Theme & Water Park of the Year Award

From the Read. archive

Among the original Read.’s local-news stories was this one: Yas Waterworld, Abu Dhabi’s flagship water park, had bagged a theme-and-water-park-of-the-year award — industry recognition that arrived early in the park’s life and kept coming.

Yas Waterworld opened on Yas Island in January 2013, and it stood out from the start for a reason that had nothing to do with slide count: it was themed entirely around Emirati heritage. The park is built on the story of Dana, a young Emirati girl on a quest for a legendary pearl — a narrative rooted in the pearl-diving history of the Gulf — and the design language throughout draws on the region’s own past rather than an imported fantasy world.

That choice was a gamble in a market where most big attractions licensed global franchises, and the awards were the industry’s verdict on it. Over the years Yas Waterworld has collected a long list of honors from travel and leisure-industry bodies, and it remains a fixture in regional “best water park” rankings — while the Dana story is still the spine of the park today.

The park sits alongside Ferrari World Abu Dhabi and, later, Warner Bros. World on Yas Island — the theme-park cluster that turned the island into the UAE capital’s leisure anchor. In that lineup, Yas Waterworld is the one that tells a local story, which is a fair part of why judges kept handing it trophies.

The original Read. article did not survive in the web archives — the earliest snapshot of this address dates from after the old site went offline — so this page records the story’s headline and the park’s verifiable history rather than the details of the specific ceremony. If you can help us pin down which award and which year the original piece covered, write to info@readme.ae.